Sunday, March 11, 2012

Old Looking Sprites to Cross Stitch of an XBox 360 Fighting Game Character, Featuring Crimson Viper

Hello! Before I get going with this post, I want to write a bit about a dream I had last night. A lot of it was pretty nightmarish, due to some unspecified emergency that everyone seemed to think was about to doom us all, but at one point in it, one of my brothers walked up on stage in the high school gym, stood behind a microphone, and gave this review of The Orange Box, which my family has for our XBox. "The Orange Box has been orange-ing up my XBox for years. It has several surfaces, and the numbers are great."
After that, most of the dream was people wondering what the end of days would look like, but when I told everyone about it this morning, that part stood out as being particularly good, so I just wanted to share it with you guys. It was certainly less disturbing than the rest of the dream, but not really any less confusing, so I guess that it sort of fit.

Anyway, for today's post, I have two brand new cross stitch patterns of Crimson Viper from Street Fighter IV and some subsequent fighting games. I realize that this may be of limited appeal, but I can't go too long without doing a post like this, so it should tide me over for the next couple of weeks. A lot of you who read this may have noticed that, as far as fighting games go, I tend to play a lot more games from SNK than Capcom, which is mostly because I'm a snotty fangirl. That doesn't mean that I have anything at all against Capcom's games, however, and though I haven't played it for a while, I thought that Street Fighter IV was a pretty spiffy game and usually ended up playing as Crimson Viper. Because the graphics in Street Fighter IV are that weird polygonal semi-3D stuff with black lines all over the place and people that get weird and bulgy-eyed when they get hit, though, it's more difficult to just go, "Oh, I think that I ought to cross stitch this character!" than it is with a lot of other games. I didn't really intend to let that stop me, though, so I decided to make a fake 8-bit version of her, like she might look in one of the pirated NES versions of the older Street Fighter games. I've done this with King of Fighters characters before, and though it was fun, I didn't feel like I got things to look quite right. With this pattern, though, I thought that the character worked really well with the less detailed style, even after I'd switched the sprite I made to the slightly off NES colors. I ended up putting it on a grid that divided it into 8x8 squares as I worked, so I could do a color switch and give her a bright yellow belt buckle at the cost of some of her hair being the wrong color, which I've seen a few times in the bootlegged game sprites, and even though her outfit is supposed to be black, I used a dark blue for this sprite, since it looked cooler. I might try this again with some more fighting game characters, but for now, here's my stitched version of the faux NES Crimson Viper sprite.

Now, in case you're looking at that and going, "Wow! I can't wait to make this incredibly specific and completely unnecessary cross stitch project for myself! I've sat up at night just praying that someone would look at the sprites from a bootleg NES game and say to themselves that they needed to make a cross stitch pattern of something very similar to them, but of a different character," you're in luck! Here is the pattern for the project pictured above.

In the more likely event that you like the character and wouldn't mind stitching or perler beading her, but don't really want to put that much time into it, however, here is a sprite pattern of Crimson Viper in this blog's standard format! As far as my collection goes, she should look super cool between the cast of Robotech and the two leads from The Artist, so I hope that some of you like this chart, too.

After all of that rubbish, I should probably just quit typing and go to bed, but I have a blurry and crooked WIP photo of my cross stitch of Holo from Spice and Wolf to post before I go! I didn't work on this for a long time, but she's been my project of choice for the last few days and is almost done. The middle color in her hair got finished today, which was the most tedious part of it, so I think I should be able to finish it in the next couple of days. Right now, however, it looks sort of weird.

Now that I have that posted, I really am done for tonight, though I'm hoping to be back with another post in the next couple of days. I got a request for some sprite patterns from an anime that's been very popular for a long time that I'd like to start working on, so that should be fun, and I'd like to do a new features post soon, too, which should be quite cool. Until then, however, I hope all of you are doing well and starting off your weeks nicely!